Ukrainian fighters in the tunnels underneath Mariupol's pulverized steel plant held out against Russian troops Thursday in an increasingly desperate and perhaps doomed effort to deny Moscow what would be its biggest success of the war yet, as more civilians were moved to safety.
The bloody battle came amid growing suspicions that President Vladimir Putin wants to present the Russian people with a major battlefield success — or announce an escalation of the war — in time for Victory Day on Monday. That is the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar, marking the Soviet Union's triumph over Nazi Germany.
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Some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, by Russia's most recent estimate, were holed up in the tunnels and bunkers under the sprawling Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, the last pocket of resistance in a city largely reduced to rubble over the past two months.
The head of the United Nations said another attempt to evacuate civilians from Mariupol and the plant was successfully carried out Thursday. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said: "We must continue to do all we can to get people out of these hellscapes."
He later tweeted that 500 people were successfully freed from the plant and area around it.
In a joint <a href="https://twitter.com/UN?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@UN</a>-<a href="https://twitter.com/ICRC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ICRC</a> operation, 2 safe passage convoys successfully evacuated nearly 500 people from the Azovstal plant, Mariupol & surrounding areas.<br><br>I hope that continued coordination with Moscow & Kyiv will lead to more humanitarian pauses to allow civilians safe passage.
—@antonioguterres
In a video statement recorded Thursday from the underground bunkers, Capt. Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of Ukraine's Azov Regiment, said the "wounded soldiers are dying in agony due to the lack of proper treatment."
The Azov Regiment is a far-right armed group that was folded into Ukraine's National Guard after Russia's first invasion in 2014.
The defenders will "stand till the end. They only hope for a miracle," Kateryna Prokopenko said after speaking by phone to her husband, a leader of the steel plant defenders. "They won't surrender."
She said her husband, Azov Regiment commander Denys Prokopenko, told her he would love her forever.
"I am going mad from this. It seemed like words of goodbye," she said.
'Just imagine this hell,' Zelensky says
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack was preventing the evacuation of civilians remaining in the plant's underground bunkers.
"Just imagine this hell! And there are children there," he said late Thursday in his nightly video address. "More than two months of constant shelling, bombing, constant death."
Russia denies going into plant
The Russians managed to get inside with the help of an electrician who knew the layout, said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's Internal Affairs Ministry.
"He showed them the underground tunnels which are leading to the factory," Gerashchenko said in a video posted late Wednesday. "Yesterday, the Russians started storming these tunnels, using the information they received from the betrayer."
The Kremlin denied its troops were storming the plant and demanded the troops surrender. They have refused. Russia has also accused them of preventing the civilians from leaving.
Ukraine repels Russians in east
Meanwhile, 10 weeks into the devastating war, Ukraine's military claimed it recaptured some areas in the south and repelled other attacks in the east, further frustrating Putin's ambitions after his abortive attempt to seize Kyiv. Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting village by village.
U.S. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said Russian forces are making only "plodding" progress in the Donbas.
The head of Britain's armed forces, Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin, said Putin is "trying to rush to a tactical victory" before Victory Day. But he said Russian forces are struggling to gain momentum.
Fearful of new attacks surrounding Victory Day, the mayor of the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk urged residents to leave for the countryside over the long weekend and warned them not to gather in public places.
And the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, a key transit point for evacuees from Mariupol, announced a curfew from Sunday evening through Tuesday morning.
Devastating toll on health care
In a video address to a medical charity Thursday, Zelensky described the toll the invasion has taken on Ukraine's health-care system, saying hundreds of hospitals and other medical institutions have been devastated, while doctors have been left without drugs to tackle cancer or the ability to perform surgery.
Many places, he said, lack even basic antibiotics in eastern and southern Ukraine, the main battlefields.
"If you consider just medical infrastructure, as of today Russian troops have destroyed or damaged nearly 400 health-care institutions: hospitals, maternity wards, outpatient clinics," Zelensky said.
In areas occupied by Russian forces the situation is catastrophic, he said.
"This amounts to a complete lack of medication for cancer patients. It means extreme difficulties or a complete lack of insulin for diabetes. It is impossible to carry out surgery. It even means, quite simply, a lack of antibiotics."
In one of the most widely denounced acts of the war, a maternity hospital was all but destroyed on March 9 in the besieged port city of Mariupol. Russia alleged pictures of the attack were staged and said the site had been used by armed Ukrainian groups.
The Kremlin says it targets only military or strategic sites and does not target civilians.
Belarus calls for end to conflict
In other developments, Belarus's authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, defended Russia's invasion of Ukraine in an interview with The Associated Press, but said he didn't expect the conflict to "drag on this way."
Lukashenko, whose country was used by the Russians as a launch pad for the invasion, said Moscow had to act because Kyiv was "provoking" Russia.
But in the interview, he created some distance between himself and the Kremlin, repeatedly calling for an end to the conflict and referring to it as a "war" — a term Moscow refuses to use. The Kremlin insists on calling it a "special military operation."
More civilians freed as Ukrainian troops hold off Russians in fight for control of Mariupol steel plant - CBC News
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